Southeast Asia's club of nations, ASEAN, turned 39 on Tuesday and already it appears to be grappling with a mid-life crisis.
ASEAN, born out of the Cold War of the 1960s, began as a group of newly independent states dedicated to fighting communism and aching for stability.
Four decades later, on "ASEAN Day," the group has developed a middle-age obsession: economics. It's in a race to remain competitive against the emerging might of China and India.
And, so far, despite plenty of frustration with ASEAN's pace of reform, the club appears to be making some progress.
"Twenty years ago or more, there was a long-standing consensus that you shouldn't take ASEAN declarations at their word," said Natasha Hamilton-Hart, associate professor of Southeast Asian studies at the National University of Singapore.
"They were typically vague sort of statements of intent ... Often they were not intended to be followed by any hard, binding commitments. But I think that's changed," she said.
ASEAN is still a long way from becoming a kind of EU, which is only a decade older: there is no single market, it has a kaleidoscope of different currencies and political systems, and it still doesn't even exist as a legal entity.
But in the search for economies of scale, to avoid being robbed of foreign investment by China and India, ASEAN has made integration its mantra. It sounds like an EU in the making.
Its big dream is a "single community," where goods, services and labor flow freely across borders, and it is drafting a charter that could enshrine its recently declared adherence to democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
ASEAN also has a free-trade area, although it is riddled with temporary exclusions, and plans to put in place visa-free travel, to be followed by an open-skies airline policy.
"There are many steps that we need to take, in order to see the birth of an ASEAN community," Malaysian Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar told an ASEAN flag-raising ceremony on Tuesday.
That is an understatement -- especially given that ASEAN wants to become a single market by 2020, or within the next 10 years if a proposal to bring the date forward to 2015 is adopted.
Even ASEAN's supporters believe it would do well to achieve even some of what it has set out to do.
"We're not going to get the common market even of the type Europe had in the 1980s by 2015," said Manu Bhaskaran, a partner at economics consultancy Centennial Group in Singapore.
ASEAN's progress may be slow, and modest by EU standards, but it so far appears to be meeting the competitive threats from China and India, Bhaskaran added.
"ASEAN is beginning very slowly -- too slowly -- but they are beginning to make some of the painful decisions to really put progress on the road," he said.
Foreign direct investment dipped in China between 2004 and 2005, according to UN figures, while investment in two major ASEAN economies -- Thailand and Indonesia -- actually rose.
Last year, ASEAN states Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam were all tipped to perform well in terms of foreign direct investment in the medium term, according to a survey published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development.
Taken together, ASEAN encompasses more than 500 million people and has combined gross domestic product of more than US$800 billion, bigger than India, according to World Bank 2005 data.
As economic and social union beckons -- political union is still a bridge too far for ASEAN -- the group faces many barriers, including one of its own making: its founding principle of non-interference in a member state's domestic affairs.
Once held up as almost sacred to ASEAN, the principle has come under increasing pressure for review in the group's dealings with military-run Myanmar, which has shown little sign of moving toward democracy despite years of friendly prodding.
Myanmar's senior general, Than Shwe, used ASEAN Day on Tuesday to call for fellow members to abide by non-interference, but instead Malaysia's prime minister said non-interference might have to make room for ASEAN's new agenda: integration.
"That principle might require refinement, especially in the face of the onslaught of globalization," Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said in his ASEAN Day lecture in Kuala Lumpur.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers